America’s Concern regarding Yemen Conflict.

That’s a question a lot of people have been asking themselves ever since a Navy SEAL was lost in a raid on al-Qaeda in Yemen and the Trump administration authorized a furious barrage of strikes against targets there. Now, The Washington Post, the Trump administration is considering further escalating U.S. involvement in the country even as the United States weighs whether additional intervention in Syria is warranted.

Because there are actually three conflicts playing out in Yemen—all of which grew out of a civil war that began in 2015—it’s easy to get confused by what the administration may be doing. First, there is the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen, now in its third bloody year. Partially nested within this first conflict is the Iranian campaign in Yemen, which, according to the US military, has led to the introduction of anti-ship weaponry that imperils global trade and freedom of commerce through the Bab al-Mandeb strait—which separates the Arabian peninsula from the Horn of Africa—and threatens to internationalize an already terrible situation. Finally, there is the U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which began to ramp up again in the last year of the Obama administration and which has gathered momentum in the first few months of the Trump administration.

I’ll spend some time on each conflict, but let me cut to the chase: I assess the Trump administration is trying to intensify its efforts to counter al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthi maritime threat because those efforts are in the interests of the United States. But the Trump administration will try to do so in such a way as to convince both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—the two most important U.S. partners in the Gulf—that the United States takes seriously their fears about spreading Iranian influence, and in a manner that might allow the Saudi-led coalition a path to climb down from the mess it’s gotten into in Yemen. Escalating the conflict in a way that encourages more Saudi-led offensives would be a mistake, and there’s a real danger the Trump administration gets its calculus wrong in this regard.

The Saudi Campaign in Yemen

Let’s start with the Saudi-led campaign against the Houthis. This conflict has been a disaster for the people of both Yemen and southern Saudi Arabia. It shows little sign of ending soon. Saudi Arabia has not been able to translate its billions of dollars of defense expenditures into a satisfactory political outcome, which, to be fair, is a situation in which the United States has also often found itself in the Middle East.

Saudi Arabia’s allies—most notably the United Arab Emirates—have nonetheless thrown themselves behind the principal author of the Saudi campaign, the deputy crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman. Prince Mohamed is very young, barely into his 30s, yet has pushed his country toward an ambitious plan to modernize both Saudi Arabia’s economy as well as its military. If Prince Mohamed is successful doing even a third of what he aspires to accomplish, he could succeed his elderly father and be the king of Saudi Arabia for half a century. Saudi Arabia’s neighbors reason King Mohamed will remember who stood with him in his moment of greatest need.

Many U.S. partners, and especially the Emiratis, who have forged a close partnership with Prince Mohamed, are also pushing the United States to invest in its relationship with him—which may help explain the red-carpet treatment he got on his visit to the United States in March. At his meeting with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in his capacity as the Saudi minister of defense, for example, no fewer than five high-ranking White House officials were present: National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner, Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell, and Middle East adviser Derek Harvey. I sat in on numerous meetings between former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Prince Mohamed in 2015 and 2016, and although the Obama administration is often criticized for micromanagement (with some justification), I never recall a single White House official, never mind five, sitting in on any Pentagon bilateral meetings. Part of this high-level involvement may reflect the power struggle within the White House and the feeling among the many competing centers of power there that they can’t afford to be seen missing a key meeting. But it might also reflect a persistent lobbying campaign from the Emiratis and others to persuade the Trump administration to invest early and heavily in a relationship with Prince Mohamed.

The Obama administration couldn’t make up its mind on the Saudi campaign in Yemen. On the one hand, it didn’t want to encourage what it thought to be a misguided campaign that showed little promise of decisive victory. On the other hand, it didn’t want to wreck its relationship with Saudi Arabia—or the UAE, whose pluck and military power senior Obama administration officials from the president on down admired. So the Obama administration pressed the Departments of Defense and State to continue delivering precision-guided munitions and aerial refueling to the Saudi-led coalition, while working with the Royal Saudi Air Force to adopt the same kinds of best practices the U.S. Air Force had used to minimize civilian casualties in the war against the Islamic State. The Saudis were eager students, but as we at the Pentagon often explained to our exasperated colleagues at the White House each time an errant (or deliberate) Saudi bomb killed Yemeni civilians, the deficiencies in the Royal Saudi Air Force at the operational level were glaring, and it was hard to rebuild the proverbial airplane while it was in the air.

The Obama administration couldn’t make up its mind on the Saudi campaign in Yemen.

The performance of the Saudis reflected poorly on the Department of Defense in particular: Although individual Saudi pilots had often performed well flying as part of U.S.-led coalitions, decades of U.S. training missions had not produced a Saudi military capable of independently planning and executing an effective air campaign that minimized collateral damage. And however much Saudi air forces struggled, Saudi ground forces labored even harder, trying and repeatedly failing to prevent or even counter Houthi ground excursions across the border.

In the end, no one in the Obama White House seemed able to answer whether or not we wanted to help the Saudis win their conflict in Yemen. We did just enough to earn the enmity of the human-rights community and members of Congress concerned about civilian casualties, yet not enough to enable conflict termination. Meeting after meeting chaired by the White House focused on the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Yemen—and deteriorate it surely did—while very little thought was given to the idea that the humanitarian situation was not the result of a hurricane or some other natural disaster but the result of a conflict that we ourselves could affect.

The Post now reports the Trump administration is poised to do what we in the Obama administration would not: enable the only competent force in the Saudi-led coalition—the Emiratis—to seize the port of Hodeida on Yemen’s western coast. If I had any confidence this would hasten conflict termination, I would support this, but I fear it will not.

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